Chicago's Black Traffic
IN
ite Girls
o
An article on the Great " White Slave" Question
ILLUSTRATED
I
. 3rau QTururr-Zimtttrrtnamt, fH. S.
'
JEAN TURNER -ZIMMERMANN, M. D.
CHICAGO'S
BLACK TRAFFIC
IN
WHITE GIRLS
By
MRS. JEAN TURNER-ZIMMERMANN, M. D.
President of the
CHICAGO RESCUE MISSION and
WOMAN'S SHELTER
AND
Superintendent of
The DEPARTMENT OF PURITY AND HEREDITY of the
COOK COUNTY W. C. T. U.
733 Washington Boulevard, CHICAGO
REV. R. IRA STONE
Superintendent of the Chicago Rescue Mission
Foreword
|W[Y SOLE AIM in bringing this little pam-
phlet to you is to definitely call the
attention of the men and women of the Central
Western States, and especially those of the City
of Chicago into whose hands it may come, to the
vicious, thoroughly organized white-slave traffic
of to-day, and its attendant, far-reaching, hor-
rible results upon the young man and woman-
hood of our Land.
During a constant residence covering seven
years of time in the central slum districts of the
West and South Sides of Chicago, I have gained
much actual knowledge of the questions of pov-
erty, drink and prostitution among the lost men
and women of these great neigh borhoods, have
become personally acquainted with very many of
them, visiting them, listening to their heart stories
and growing to know much of their inside lives,
and have learned a real tender interest and pity
for them in their remorseful, helpless, hopeless
condition.
All incidents, references and statistics (as
far as possible) herein given are strictly
authentic, and have been collected with great
care and fairness either by myself or my
assistants.
Statistical references have been taken from
the writings of United States Attorney Sims,
6 Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
Rev. Ernest A. Bell and others engaged in prose-
cuting and reform work, all of whom I thank
sincerely and wish well in what they are accom-
plishing for good where it is so desperately
needed in this submerged underworld of our city.
So in bringing this eighth edition of CHICA-
GO'S BLACK TRAFFIC IN WHITE GIRLS to you, a
part of which has already been published under
the title of CHICAGO'S SOUL MARKET, it is the
aim of the writer to give more thought and time
to real, existing conditions descriptions and
actual facts relative to public prostitution and
its attendant frightful results, rather than to such
matter as incidents, "cases," etc., knowledge of
which can usually be acquired by simply reading
the daily press of Chicago or New York. All
descriptions, statistics and photographs are
taken by the author from actual contact with the
great underworld and quoted with names, dates,
etc., of those concerned and are absolutely
authentic .
We, together with thousands of others-
editors, legislators, club women, ministers arid
everybody else who has the welfare of the girl-
hood of our Land at heart, believe that the time
for prudery and concealment is past and that
honest men and women should know what there
is to know about this thoroughly organized,
solidly financed system of White Slavery flourish-
ing and growing in America to-day a system
which controls and ruins hundreds of thousands
Chicago's 11 Jack Traffic in \\liitc Girls 7
of women in our midst every year and whicli
requires a constant sacrifice of more than sixty
thousand young girls annually to feed its death
and disease dealing machinery.
Most people think of harlotry or prostitution as
something secret something to be kept from the
public eye, something to be ashamed of. Not
so to the great throng of Chicago whore-mongers.
Everything that can be done to attract attention
n nd custom is done by the five thousand men
and hundreds of hideous, brutish madams who
in this city exploit the bodies and live off the
earnings of thirty thousand public women in
our midst. The twenty-seven hundred (quoting
from a statement of Chief of Police Stewart)
houses of ill-fame here are conducted with as
much publicity and advertising as the grocery
or meat market nearby. Each adjoining and
nearby saloon, with its wine rooms and booths,
is an advertising and recruiting agency; the
ward politician, the officers on the beat, the
common "pimp" and the recognized whore-
mongers, work harmoniously together to exploit
this vast business.
Reckoning the number of White Slaves in
Chicago at thirty thousand, and the average
number of men entertained by each of these
unfortunate women nightly at five (a very low
average) with an average per man of one dollar,
there is poured monthly Four Million Five
Hundred Thousand Dollars, blood money, into
the coffers of these human dealers as the
rental for profit of the bodies of our American
8 Chicago's Black Traffic in WJiitc Girls
girl and her alien sister who has been mercilessly
trapped, lured from her home and sold into the
great festering cesspool, without the slightest
knowledge of our customs and laws, and ruined
forever.
New York City is the great eastern head-
quarters and westward shipping point for Ori-
ental and European White Slaves. Mark this
statement :
"Seventeen hundred girls, by actual count, were lost
on the way front New York to Cl tic ago last year, according
to an investigation now being made by the Commissioner
of Immigration . Somehow these girls were spirited away
from the care of the agents to zvhom they were entrusted
and vvere never seen nor heard of again."
Isn't that an appalling fact? for fact it is
seventeen hundred girls lost and gone forever
just from this one line of travel alone and in
just one year! These girls, who came to this
Country to better themselves, to make an honest
living, broken and rotting to-day behind bolts
arid bars in some of our cities' foul dives, or
else shipped on and on until at last in some
Chinese underground cellar or under the lash of
a South American or Philippine whore-master,
Death at last comes to the rescue.
Please remember, as you read this, that
America is becoming more and more un-Ameri-
can every day. Each ship, each train West-
ward or Eastward bound, is now daily dumping
into our Land, so lately the goal of the home-
seeker from Germany, Sweden, Ireland, etc.,
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 9
the real future citizen thousands of the scum
and vice and criminal element of South Eastern
Europe, Asia and the Orient, and remember
too that a short five-years of residence here con-
verts the filthiest criminal from Turkey, Arabia,
Syria, Italy, or of any place else where vice and
brutality reign supreme, into an American
citizen with the right to vote into office men
who will and are sworn to protect and aid in
every possible way the Jewish, Russian, French
or Chinese whore- master as he rents a shanty
and proceeds to fatten on the very life-blood of
the young girlhood of this and other lands.
JEAN TURNER-ZIMMERMANN, M. D.
Open prostitution White Slavery, as it exists
to-day in Chicago, is almost entirely under foreign
control. Of the twenty-seven hundred houses
of ill-fame in Chicago, a very large percentage
are owned and controlled by foreigners from
Southeastern Europe, while almost without
exception all Levee and White Slave resorts in
the segregated districts are under the direct
ownership of the moral and civic degenerates of
the French, Italian, Syrian, Russian, Jewish
or Chinese races once in a great while you may
find a German or Swedish whore-master, but
very seldom an American or an Englishman
conducting such a business is almost entirely
unknown. American men raise the girlhood,
make the laws and elect the officials whereby
this bloody business may be carried on and
exploited by a foaming pack of foreign hell-
hounds, who after their work of death is accom-
plished and their coffers filled, go home to their
South Europe or Turkish haunts with their blood
and soul money, to lives of filth and idleness in
their own lands.
I appeal in the name of Jehovah, to the
Church, to the women's clubs, to the labor
federations and all honorable Jews and others of
foreign birth who have come to America for a
home and a decent, honorable living, to aid in
Chicago's Black Traffic in \VJiite Girls 11
cvory possible way the great work now going
on to eradicate segregated, protected White
Slavery from our Land.
EXTRACTS FROM THE DAILY PAPERS
Quoting from the Daily Press, May 4, regard-
ing the recent investigations in New York con-
cerning the question of White Slavery by the
Rockefeller jury (which after buying two girls
themselves, later declared, "there is no traffic
in women in New York") :
Harry Levenson, the acknowledged "trader" of
women who is in the Tombs under $25,000 bail,
made a startling confession to the District Attorney
to-night, giving names of men and women whose
sole occupation is dealing in unfortunates.
" I know of three places in New York," Levenson
said, "where five to ten girls are kept constantly at
hand for sale. At any hour of the day or night one
of them, two or the whole ten, can be bought by any
one with the money to pay for them. They can be
shipped anywhere at an hour's notice."
GIVES HINT ON ARRESTS
The "trader" gave to Mr. Whitman the addresses
of the three places, which are known as "stockades."
He also made suggestions as to how their operators
might be apprehended.
More than that, Levenson told how the financial
arrangements of the sales are made and how recruits
are obtained.
Agents are continually at work obtaining young
girls, the prisoner said. The slave sellers do not
12 Chicago 's Black Traffic in White Girls
want hardened women, he explained; they want
pretty, immature girls. The agents are generally
well dressed women who ingratiate themselves with
their childish victims at matinees and moving-picture
shows, and by dining them and painting rosy-
pictures of a life of ease, win them away from
their homes or their ill-paid positions.
"When there is a call for girls," Levenson con-
tinued, "the buyer hands over the money paid for
them to the keeper. Then an agent these are
usually men take the girls to wherever the "order"
comes from. These agents then collect 10 per cent
of the girl's weekly earnings."
Quoting from the National Prohibitionist,
May 12:
THE SLAVE TRADE AND THE VOTER
The Christian voter who reads, and reads with
blood boiling, as the blood of every honest man
must, the shameful story of the exposure of the
traffic in girls especially in New York, must not
allow his imagination to run away with his reasoning
faculties.
Awful as the story is, we invite attention, not to
its horror the horror of herds of little girls sold at
a per-head price below the value of pigs but to the
practical questions of responsibility and cure.
Why does this infamy exist in our cities?
How can it exist?
Who is responsible?
The answers all come to one point the govern-
ments that rule our cities.
The black and white wretches who are the imme-
diate agents of vice are hardly worth considering.
Chicago's Black Traffic in WJiite Girls 13
They are mere incidents. Practically it is a waste
of time to even prosecute them.
The trail of the real criminal leads into the
police headquarters, leads up the steps of the city
hall, goes across the threshold of the mayor's private
office, enters the homes of Christian citizens and lies
broad through the doors of the church.
For this infamy of the sale of innocent girls for
vice and the whole wider, deeper, fouler vice system
is a part of governmental policy, not in New York
and Chicago alone, but all over the Country, under
Republican and Democratic administration.
The very district attorney's office that exposes
these particular instances of crime is one of the
strong pillars of the system of which the crime is
only an outcropping.
Even now there is not a voice lifted in official
Chicago and New York in favor of doing the one
thing that alone can stop the sale of girls, the one
thing that the law clearly prescribes in the matter
wiping out the vice preserves, stopping the whole
system of trade in vice. This fact needs to be
burned deeply into the hearts of American voters:
If you want this thing to go on, if you want little
girls still to be bought and sold like pigs, if you
want pure young lives to be overwhelmed in
fathomless shame, all you need to do to help keep
up the system is to keep on voting for men who
protect these criminals.
Quoting from MeClure's (July) Magazine
concerning the recent investigation of the White
Slave trade in New York City by a specially
appointed jury:
In order to establish the existence of the White
Slave traffic Assistant District Attorney James B.
14 Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
Reynolds arranged to make actual purchases of girls
in the Tenderloin and other sections of the under-
world from those reputed to be large dealers.
Skilled investigators who were not known in New
York were engaged and put to work in the heart of
the Tenderloin.
They were represented as purchasers of girls.
Friendly and confidential relations were established
with some of the most influential White Slave
dealers. By these means valuable first-hand infor-
mation was obtained regarding the White Slave
trade. The agents were told the price of girls, th,e
methods employed in the business, and, in some
cases, the corrupt relations existing between the
traders and certain officials.
Past and present conditions of the traffic were
contrasted frequently, the trading during the present
winter being described as exceptionally light because
of the general alarm caused by the sitting of the
"White Slave" Grand Jury. One large dealer told
the agents that though two years ago he could have
sold them all the girls they wanted at $5 or $10
apiece, he would not risk selling one in New York
now for $1,000.
In spite of this general caution, purchases for
cash were made of four girls, two through an East
Side dealer, who boasted of formerly having made
large sales in other cities, and two from a so-called
black and tan dealer. Two of the girls are under 18.
. . . With rare exceptions, not only the inno-
cent women imported into this Country, but the
prostitutes as well, are associated with men whose
business it is to protect them, direct them, and con-
trol them, and who frequently, if not usually, make
it their business to plunder them unmercifully. Now
Chicago's Black Traffic in \Vhitc Girls 15
this system of subjection to a man has become
common. The procurer or the pimp may put his
woman into a disorderly house, sharing profits with
the "madam". He may sell her outright; he may
act as an agent for another man; he may keep her,
making arrangements for her hunting men. She
must walk the streets and secure her patrons, to be
exploited, not for her own sake, but for that of her
owner. Often he does not tell her even his real
name. If she tries to leave her man, she is threat-
ened with arrest. If she resists, she may be beaten;
in some cases, when she has betrayed her betrayer,
she has been murdered.
The ease and apparent certainty of profit has led
thousands of our younger men, usually those of
foreign birth or the immediate sons of foreigners, to
abandon the useful arts of life to undertake the
most accursed business ever devised by man.
Those who recruit women for immoral purposes
watch all places where young women are likely to
be found under circumstances which will give them
a ready means of acquaintance and intimacy, such
as picture shows, dance-halls, sometimes waiting
rooms in large department stores, railroad stations,
manicuring and hair dressing establishments.
The strongest appeal to the instincts of humanity
in every right-minded person is made by a consider-
ation of the brutal system employed by these traf-
fickers to in every way exploit their victims, the
hardened prostitute as well as the innocent maiden.
It is probable that a somewhat larger proportion of
the American girls are free from the control of a
master; and yet, according to the best evidences ob-
tainable according to the stories of the women
themselves and the keepers of the houses nearly
all the women now engaged in this business in our
16- Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
large cities are subject to pimps, to whom they give
most of their earnings, or else they are under the
domination of keepers of houses, a condition that is
practically the same.
It is the business of the man who controls the
women to provide police protection, either by
bribing the police not to arrest her, or, in case of
arrest, to secure bail, pay the fine, etc., to make all
business arrangements, to decide what streets, res-
taurants, dance-halls, saloons and similar places she
shall frequent.
There are large numbers of Jews scattered
throughout the United States, although mainly lo-
cated in New York and Chicago, who seduce and keep
girls. Some of them are engaged in importation, but
apparently they prey rather upon young girls whom
they find on the street, in the dance-halls, and
similar places, and who, by the methods already
indicated love-making and pretense of marriage
they deceive and ruin. Many of them are petty
thieves, pickpockets and gamblers. They also have
various resorts where they meet and receive their
mail, and transact business with one another, and
visit. Perhaps the best known organization of this
kind throughout this Country was one legally incor-
porated in New York in 1904, under the name of
the New York Benevolent Association.
It is, of course, difficult to prove by specific
cases the relation of the police to this traffic, and to
establish by specific evidence the fact generally
accepted that the girls of disorderly house keepers
regularly pay the police for protection; but high
police officials, prosecuting officers, and social
workers in all quarters assert that in many, if not
all of our large cities, much corruption of this kind
exists.
Chicago's Black Traffic in \Vhitc Girls 17
The importation and harboring of alien women
and girls for immoral purposes and the practice of
prostitution by them the so-called "white slave
traffic" is the most pitiful and revolting phase of
the immigration question. This business has as-
sumed large proportions, and it has been exerting
so evil an influence upon our Country that the Im-
migration Commission felt compelled to make it the
subject of a thorough investigation.
The investigation was begun in November, 1907,
under the active supervision of a special committee
of the Immigration Commission; and the work was
conducted by a special agent in charge, with numer-
ous assistants.
The investigation has covered the cities of New
York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland,
Salt Lake City, Ogden, Butte, Denver, Buffalo,
Boston and New Orleans.
There are between seven and eight hundred men
in Seattle who live from the revenue from the
"white slave traffic", almost all of whom could be
reached by the State Courts, if proper efforts were
made. It was established by the Grand Jury that
the Federal Government has gone as far as the law
allows. It is now up to the State authorities, who
could break up this business in short order.
What are We Going to Do About
the Children?
Levee women, women living in prostitution,
"madams," etc., do not bring up their chil-
dren (and most of Chicago's female dealers in
A Group of Children in the Midst of the "Red Light" District
prostitution have several of them) in or near
segregated districts of vice. Like the saloon
keeper who moved to Evanston to get his chil-
dren away from the harmful, degenerating influ-
ences of the saloon and its environing neighbor-
hoods, so the "madam," that active principal
in the slavedom of the girls of our Land, in
almost every case sees to it that her children are
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 19
well brought up, away from the influences and
knowledge of prostitution, while her agents and
keepers are out scouring the department stores,
factories, villages and country homes for girls
to fill the sickening, festering, shrieking ranks
of the great death army of publicly protected
White Slaves.
The writer has investigated many cases, and
in every instance has found the children of these
vultures of girlhood in exclusive colleges or mili-
tary schools, being excellently prepared to take
decent positions in business and social life.
Case after case has recently come to light of
women supporting their children on the fashion-
able avenues, in Harvard and military colleges,
while they themselves with hearts of hell, wring
the dollars that pay for these luxuries from the
bleeding, broken bodies of a gang of Levee White
Slaves your sister and mine younger than her
own, better born, better raised, but lost forever
in the crushing, barred and screened gehenna of
modern harlotry.
Sixty-nine per cent of the children raised in
the vast slum neighborhoods surrounding the
segregated districts of prostitution are ruined
before reaching the age of eighteen. This
dreadful, appalling feature has been recently
brought to light through close investigation by
the writer and her co-workers, together with the
sickening fact that little girls scarcely more than
babies, are being constantly sought, secured and
sacrificed to satisfy the cravings of abnormal,
degenerate vice and debauchery abounding in
20 Chicago 's Black Traffic in White Girls
every large city. These little children, painted
and showily dressed, are fast making their
appearance in such cities as New York and Chi-
cago, and they are the forerunners of Oriental
child debauchery. These little girls are seldom
seen on the streets, but may be recognized when
seen, by their deformed, bowed legs, bent backs
and shrivelled little, old faces such faces as we
find in cripples aged by pain. Our hearts have
been almost stilled as we have listened to the
terrible stories of the hundreds of little girls in
the ghastly fleshmarkets of India and China who,
by the knife and the insertion into their tender
bodies of wedges of expanding wood, are thus
made ready, through months of torture, for the
use of some inhuman Hindu or Chinese monster
who for the sum of a few dollars purchases the
use of their shrieking, quivering bodies, to leave
them after a day or two of unparalleled debauch-
ery, dead, or if still living, then with broken
back or limbs, a human sacrifice indeed.
We have read and known all this and wished
that we could die that these children might be
saved but listen, do we realize that with the
influx into our midst, into our larger cities, of
the vilest, most degenerate men and women on
earth, thousands upon thousands of the most
hellish brutes of Asia and China men who
reckon girlhood lower than the female dog, has
come this very thing this reeking, diabolical
crime against innocent girlhood. Two especially
revolting cases have come under the direct
notice of the writer, yet without sufficient legal
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 21
proof to face in court the organized, thoroughly
financed band of men and women exploiting
these dreadful conditions: one, a girl Louise, on
Custom House Place; the other, Rosie from the
22nd Street environments. The last named,
cut, torn and bleeding, made a statement to
the writer that cannot be put in print; yet she
was by her owners accused of masturbation.
Both of these girls were under ten years of age.
The exploitation of women in Chicago in the
vast business of White Slavery and segregated
vice, is carried on very openly and above board.
Street walkers carry on their nefarious business
of securing trade for the "house" almost entirely
unmolested. Women stand in the doors of the
West Side houses of ill-fame and solicit those
who pass.
At 737 Washington boulevard, two doors
west of the Chicago Rescue Mission, with
which the writer is connected, a woman* stands
in the door constantly soliciting each male pas-
ser-by; boys are invited to come in and take
their first lesson in vice, and on this block are
many, many children, boys and girls. One of
the "girls" kept by this woman was a harlot
known as "No-nose" whose whole face was so
sunken with syphilis that her nose was almost
gone. The writer remembers well when through
the efforts of a fellow-corker "No-nose" wns
sent to the County Hospital for medical treat-
ment, and considers this girl one of the greatest
* Through the effort of the writer and the aid of the agent of
the building this woman was made to move a little further west.
'2'2 Chicago's Black Traffic in Wliitc Girls
menaces to Chicago boyhood. No man would
have touched the woman.
The blocks in this immediate vicinity are all
thickly peopled by families with many children
in them. The following group of little girls
live in their alley-homes within a few doors of
some of the worst sights and dives in Chicago.
Children of the Slums
They see no sights but vice, they hear no
talk but filth. At the age of ten they are per-
fectly familiar with all the ins and outs of har-
lotry, know many prostitutes, many pimps.
Do you think these girls (each one is known
to the writer personally) have any chance for
virtue?
At 804 Washington Boulevard, almost across
the street from the writer's office, appears the
23 Chicago's Black Traffic in Wliite Girls
following sign on the window of the cigar store
located there.
Hundreds of the wreckage of typical White
Slavery pass this place daily, for it is located
at the edge of the great VVest Side dumping
ground for broken, diseased women and young
girls whose bodies can no longer be profitably
used in the higher class dives of the South Side
segregated districts, and who must at the end of
a year or two become, if they are still living, the
notorious women of the night who walk the streets
and alleys, selling the use of their vile bodies
for twenty-five cents, ten cents, a drink of beer
or a crust of free lunch, becoming the prey of
the drunken bum, the low vicious foreigner, the
negro, or else the ruination of every young boy
who falls into their vulture-like clutches.
In all Chicago there could not be a generally
worse neigborhood than the one in which the
White Slave Cigar is manufactured and adver-
tised for sale. Within a few blocks of the fac-
tory, which is two doors west of the corner of
Washington Boulevard and Elalsted Street, there
are a thousand broken, pitiful lost White Slaves.
"24 CJiicagos Black Traffic in \VJiitc Girls
Within two or three blocks of this corner,
five typical White Slaves have been murdered
(butchered would be a better word) within the
space of just a few weeks. Here drunken wo-
men, the outcast element of the better class of
dives, trail their filthy bodies day and night,
their sunken, half-starved, syphjletic faces
staring in your face, seeking the man or the
young boy who will give them a drink of whiskey
or a crust of bread in return for the wretched
commerce they have to offer. Here, too, the
children play and little girls grow into big girls
with scarcely a ghost of a chance to be decent,
and facing all hangs the sign "White Slave
Cigar," manufactured by George F. Walz.
It is out of this great outlaw district, this
vast West Side charnal house of harlotry, that
the City gets its supply of girls for that class of
vice known as degeneracy.
Five years of work in prostitution constitutes
the life of the average harlot. Many, before the
time allotted to them in a life of ill-fame expires,
die; many commit suicide, yet some live on,
their diseased bodies constituting that class of
girls known as street walkers and degenerates.
These women, who are really only young girls,
hang around the back rooms and cellars of the
barrel houses, consorting with the drunken,
crippled, diseased men who congregate in such
places, and from this vast army of lost girlhood
is supplied the material for the immoral Oriental
shows abounding in the segregated districts,
where with dogs and burros, the bodies of
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 25
ruined, diseased girls are finally used up and
destroyed, or in the bestial dives in which are
practiced that horrible crime known as the
" French method."
Sixty-nine per cent of the little girls who
must, through necessity and environment, grow
up in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding
the segregated vice districts of such cities as
Chicago, New York, Seattle, etc., are ruined
before they reach the age of eighteen years.
Think of it! These children know little else
than drink and prostitution, hear little else, see
little else. To them harlotry is in all its blast-
ing, withering phases, a familiar story before
they have reached the age of ten years. Hun-
dreds of whore mongers, panderers, pimps and
outlawed harlots, exploit their awful business
and tell their vile stories as they walk the same
pathway day by day with these children little
lost souls they are the children of the poor,
looked 011 in pity though by one who said "In-
asmuch as ye have done it unto the least of
these, ye have done it unto Me."
THE TRANSIENT HOTFL EVIL.
Iii this vast underworld another trap almost
as dangerous as the house of prostitution
abounds on every hand the so-called "hotel"
really a mere house of assignation in almost
every instance. These hotels are a constant
menace to the girlhood of our Land girls who
come to the city strangers, and are unable to
discriminate between the good and bad. Dozens
of these hotels flourish all around the districts
26 Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
of vice in our cities, the abiding place of the
pimp, the beggar, the criminal, and yet flourish
under complete political protection. We sincerely
believe that the time for cleaning up has come
in such cities as New York, Chicago, etc., and
we believe that we have with us in this stand,
not only decent Chicago and New York, but
decent America,
CRUSADE AGAINST " WHITE SLAVERY."
Thirteen governments have signed the inter-
national agreement to fight the traffic in women
for immoral purposes. The terms have just
been announced at Ottawa, Canada.
The list of countries, British colonies and
protectorates which have decided to adhere to
the Anti- White Slave Traffic Agreement are:
Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark,
France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Norway,
Sweden, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Switzerland,
the Bahamas, Barbadoes, British Guiana, Can-
ada, Ceylon, Australia, Gambia, Gold Coast,
Malta, Newfoundland, Northern' Nigeria, South-
ern Rhodesia, Trinidad and the Windward
Islands.
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
27
The End of the Way. Where Young Girls, who attend Public Dance* and
Other Places of Amusement Unattended, are
Likely to Wind Up
Escape from a Life of Prostitution
is Almost Impossible
After more than four years of experience,
and after having visited in various capacities,
disguised, etc., many of the worst haunts of
vice and houses of prostitution in Chicago, I
have personally come to this conclusion:
There is but a small chance for a girl, once
having been sold into or entered upon a life of
prostitution, to ever escape therefrom. Invari-
ably she is kept in debt to her masters ; excessive
bills for parlor clothes, board, dentistry, laundry
and all conceivable expenses are kept charged
up against her. She is under constant threat of
28 Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
personal violence and blackmail in every form
(her owners securing whenever possible, some
knowledge of her home and friends, and contin-
ually holding this knowledge as a dagger over
her), and there is the ever-present whore-
masters and madams with drugs, drinks and
bolts and bars, guarding every avenue of escape
with blows and curses arid brutality beyond
conception. Very few young girls enter a life
of prostitution voluntarily, and few, having
once entered., ever escape therefrom.
A WORD OF PROTEST
The writer just here wishes to enter vigorous
protest against houses of prostitution in Chicago
and in America furnishing the American girl or
her alien sister for the use of that class of alien
men who are either excluded from citizenship in
our Country by law, or who without wife or
family, are here temporarily and simply to make
all the money possible, in as short a time and in
any way possible.
At 2130 Armour Avenue, Chicago, stands an
old tenement house filled with girls girls from
all over the United States a beautiful ruined
girl from Georgia, girls from Europe. Good
girls they were a year or two ago, but are now
the chained, wrecked slaves of festering vice and
habit. This place is said to be operated by adope-
fiend by the name of W- - and is exclusively
for the use of a class of men debarred from the
United States by law, except for educational
purposes - -and mercantile interests among their
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 29
own kind, a class of men with whom no white
laborer will live or work the class of men who
a year or two ago murdered Elsie Siegel in New
York the lop-shouldered, smuggled-in, pig-
tailed opium parched Chinese. It is a crying
shame to-day against our Churches, our Union
Labor and our Law that there is allowed to
exist on a public street, in the second city in the
United States, a public stock-market for wrecked
girlhood where the filthy Chinese, in rows, wait
their turn to rent for thirty minutes of unparal-
leled Asiatic debauchery, the bruised, bleeding
wreckage of our American home or the girl
who came to us a few months ago to the great-
est Christian Republic the Woi Id has ever builded,
from some European home and a mother, ask-
ing only a chance to go to work with her bare
hands and earn a decent living.
The American citizen refuses to admit the
Chinaman, refuses to work with him, refuses
him all rights accorded other aliens coming to
us, and yet, for the blood profits of vice and
politics, allows to be placed to his exclusive
privilege that which a short time ago was our
Nation's best and cleanest womanhood.
For an American girl entering a life of public
prostitution there is some chance of salvation,
for the immigrant girl there is indeed little.
Two years ago I had occasion to visit 21
Armour Avenue, a "50-cent house" in the
infamous "bedbug row district." It was about
three o'clock in the afternoon, just before the
30 Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
beginning of regular business hours. In the
reception room of the place, around a rusty old
stove, sat eight or ten hopeless, lost girls; sick,
smoking, cursing girls. Soon they would dress
up, dope up with whiskey, cocaine or opium,
dash some bella donna in their eyes and go
on duty to meet all comers. Shivering by the
stove sat a little foreign girl. I asked her name,
the girls told me it was Josie and that she was
an Italian. Speaking to her in that language,
I soon learned that she was a young Russian
Jewess. The house seemed to possess sufficient
proof, as the law then required, that the girl had
been in this Country three years ; so there was
little I could do except give her my card and
tell her if she ever needed a friend to come to
me. Less than a year ago there came a riug at
my door, and opening it, I found a lost woman
begging me to come at once into the West Side
"levee'' to see a girl who was dying. I went
with her, and there, in a mouldy, wretched
cellar I found "Josie" of the Armour Avenue
resort, dying with syphilis. In that awful
underground place I listened to her story and I
give it to you as she related it to me:
" I am nineteen years old and my name is Gezie
Bruvatsky. 1 saw my father bayonetted to the earth
by Russian soldiers. I saw my mother work over
the washtub until her hands were bloody that I and
my little brother might have bread and my virtue be
protected. One day a man came to our house, who
was either a Jew or a German, saying he was agent
for a steamship company and that he had good
work in America for many girls where they could
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 31
earn as much in one month as they could earn in
two years in Russia. My heart leaped with joy.
How could we know he was lying. I packed my
clothes. I left all my mother, my brother. I
came to America. Soon I could send for them, for
I was strong and could work work day and night.
At New York a man and woman met me and sent
me on to Chicago. Here I was taken from the Polk
Street Station to Armour Avenue where by force'
I was ruined. I was there many months, sick and
starving, and finally got out and crawled over to
the West Side where there are many Jews; but now
I am dying and I want my mother."
WHAT THE U. S. PROSECUTING ATTORNEY SAYS:
Hon. Edwin Sims, ex-U. S. Prosecuting
Attorney, in a recent conservative statement,
says he believes that fifteen thousand immigrant
girls are brought into this Country every year for
commercialized prostitution.
We believe the actual figures are nearer
Twenty-five Thousand, and we appeal to
the mothers and fathers of America, in the name
of God and the heart-broken mothers and
fathers of other lands, to use their personal influ-
ence and the money with which God has
entrusted them, to wipe from our flag the leprous
blotch of shame which permits the importing
in' > our Republic every year of thousands of
helpless girls to be ground up in the murder
mills of the segregated harlotry of such districts
as the 22nd Street district of Chicago, for it was
the blood-covered hand of that district that
reached across the lands and seas and into that
32 Cliicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
Russian home and tore from it little Gezie
Bruvatsky and led her across the waters and
under the very shadow of the Statue of Liberty
itself and pinning to her the little blue ticket of
immigration, led her past the gates of Ellis
Island, on past the statues of Washington and
Jefferson, of Lincoln and Grant, and into the
burning fire of American public prostitution to
live a few months, and dying in an underground
cellar, be cast, scarce cold, into our nation's
great potter's field of lost women.
The Wretched, Pitiful Ending of Gezie Bruvatsky, left by Her Hearties*
Masters to Die Unattended in Filthy, Squlid Surroundings
Chicago's Black Traffic in Wliite Girls 33
The Price of a Living Body
Fifty years ago, down in the Southland of our
America, we stood a well formed, sound limbed,
healthy, intact young woman on the auction
block and sold her to the highest bidder for her
beauty, her virtue, her heart, her honor, her
soul and her body, and the established average
price paid for such a young woman was eighteen
hundred dollars ($1800.00) . I take for granted
as I write, that if the heart and soul and body
of a young black woman of Kentucky, Georgia
or Mississippi was in the slave market of fifty
years ago worth intrinsically $1800.00, the soul
and body of a clean, decent, young Northland
white woman is to-day worth about the same.
Assistant State Prosecuting Attorney Roe in his
speech before the Illinois Vigilance Society,
Chicago, February 7th, 1909, placed the number
of women in disorderly resorts in Chicago alone
at 30,000.
Stop! Listen: If there are 30,000 young
women on this City's Soul-Market, and we place
the average value of one of these young women
at $1,800, AND WE CERTAINLY DO PLACE IT THERE,
by established, recognized precedent, then
there is $54,000,000 worth of young womanhood
in the Slave- Market of our City at the present
time. In the same statistical speech Mr. Roe
places the number of young girls necessary
yearly to recruit the rapidly decimating ranks of
this vast Death Army at six thousand; hence,
$10,800,000 worth of innocent girlhood must be
34 Chicago's Black Traffic in WJiitc Girls
sacrificed from our stores and factories, our
homes or firesides all over the Land every
twelve months to feed and satisfy the horrible
flesh-market of Human Slavery in the "levee"
districts of Chicago alone.
Harry A. Parkin, Assistant U. S. District
Attorney, in WOMEN'S WORLD, March, 1909,
says:
"The Federal investigations in Chicago and other
localities have clearly established the fact that,
generally speaking, houses of ill-fame in large cities
do not draw their recruits to any great extent from
the territory immediately surrounding them ; for vari-
ous reasons the White Slavers who are the recruiting
agents of this vile traffic prefer to work in States
more or less distant from the centers to which vic-
tims are destined."
In view of all this, it must be clearly appar-
ent that the need of the hour is legislation
which will make it as difficult and dangerous fora
White Slaver to take his victim from one State
into another as it is to bring them from France,
Italy, Canada or any other foreign country, to a
house of ill-fame in Chicago or any American
city. Therefore, it is suggested that if each
State in the Union would enact and enforce laws
against this importation, this terrible traffic
would be dealt a blow in its most vulnerable
part.
One of the strangest results brought about
by the recent White Slave prosecutions in
Chicago and the wide publicity which they have
received has been the astonishment of thousands
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 35
of persons, as evidenced by letters, at the fact
that such a wholesale traffic is actually in exist-
ence, but what is still more astounding, not to say
discouraging, is the reluctance of other thou-
sands to believe that many hundreds of men
and women are actually engaged in the business
of luring young girls and women to their destruc-
tion and that this infamous traffic is being carried
on in every state of the Union every day of the
year.
It is estimated by those who should know,
that at least five thousand men in Chicago live
off of the earnings of prostitution. For instance as
to the plan: A young girl, alien or American, is
sold into a life of ill-fame for say Two Hundred
Dollars, as the actual price of her procuring.
Before she suspects any real harm, she is lured
into a restaurant or a wine- room, becomes
intoxicated, is sufficiently doped to become
passive, is taken to the "house" to which she
has been consigned and is immediately "broken
in" in the most violent and nauseating manner,
perhaps becoming the prey of twenty or thirty men.
Beaten, threatened with exposure, and, if neces-
sary, purposely infected with gonorrhea, the girl
is within twenty- four hours absolutely ruined for
all time "spoiled," the police say. Oh! what a
whole world of agony and pain and bruises and
disease and Hell is embodied in that one word
"spoiled." She is immediately pressed into serv-
ice and from that time on until death relieves
her, or she is rescued by some one enough inter-
ested to help her, she must receive all comers
THIRTY DAYS every month.
36 Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
This answers the question I have been asked
a hundred times from all over the Country since
CHICAGO'S SOUL MARKET was first published,
as to whether a woman in a house of prostitution
is allowed any respite from service during the
Menstrual Period. SHE is NOT ALLOWED A SINGLE
DAY. The average number of men who must be
served by each woman in a medium or lower class
house of ill-fame is thirty-six per day. On entrance
to the place, if the house be a "Dollar house,"
a metal room-check is purchased from the
madam or attendant at the door for one dollar.
This check is taken up by the girl in the room
and is worth on presentation to the house fifty
cents, half of its face value being received by
the house for board, laundry, hair dressing, etc.,
all of which must be paid for at the highest
possible rates. Of the remaining fifty cents,
twenty-five cents goes to the man who sold thegirl
into the house, the remaining twenty-five cents
going to the girl herself and from this amount
must be paid all bills for clothes, dentistry, and
all other expenses. In almost every known
case, however, with which the writer is at all
familiar, the entire fifty per cent goes intact to
the owner of the girl, her necessary expenses
being paid by him and the balance pocketed for
his own use.
Just as the liquor trade is thoroughly and
carefully financed and organized even in its
weakest points, making successful prosecution
against it a thing impossible, just so is the traf-
fic in young women protected in all its details.
The writer has in mind the case of Josie E ,
Chicago's Black Traffic in \\ltitc Girls 37
fifteen years old, who came from her suburban
home in Illinois, hoping to secure employment
in the City. Arriving at the Dearborn Street
Railway Station about nine o'clock, she started
out to find a hotel in which to spend the night.
Walking a few steps from the Station, she was
accosted at State and Polk streets by a young
man who asked her what she was looking for.
Replying that she was looking for a hotel, the
man Thompson told her he was employed at a
hotel on Polk Street opposite the railway station
and offered to take the girl there. Unacquainted
with the City and relying on his word, she
accompanied him to the hotel, where she was
outraged and detained for weeks. She was
finally rescued by the writer and a Y. W. C. A.
worker. Taking her to my rooms, I found her
physical condition such that I sent for a detec-
tive from the Harrison Street Police Station who
investigated her story and finding it true in every
particular, arrested Thompson at his place of
employment, 41 Polk Street. The case coming
up in the Harrison Street Municipal Court, was
so manipulated by the defense that in the trans-
ferring of it to the Criminal Court a technical
error threw it out altogether. I simply give this
as an example of how almost utterly impossible
it is to secure a conviction in these cases. Is it
any wonder when back of this great evil stands
at least a hundred million dollars?
Listen, seventy-five per cent of the women
and girls entering lives of ill-fame in Chicago
are from adjoining States and country districts
they are utter strangers in our City. Every
38 Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
hour, day or night, year in and year out, four
great central railway passenger stations discharge
their precious human freight within the first
ward of Chicago, the richest and wickedest
political ward in the world the ward of Michael
Kenna (Hinky Dink) and "Bathhouse" John
Coughlin the ward feeding every district of
prostitution and gambling and unnatural horror
in the City the ward with two miles of indecent
resorts, whole armies of reeking lost women,
hundreds of pandering men procurers and White
Slavers the ward of thousands of Turkish,
Italian and Arabian immigrants, and opium-
parched pagan Chinese the ward in which
every day thousands of women, many of whom
without money or friends, are looking for work,
are unloaded in this seething cauldron of vice,
their only refuge being, when without funds, the
Police Station or the house of ill-repute.
The horror of conditions surrounding a woman
without money or friends in Chicago makes the
living of a moral life almost impossible for her.
1 have in mind the case of a deserted little
Italian woman, G. P , living in Plymouth
Court, south of Polk Street. G. had three little
baby girls, the eldest only four years, and was
expecting another child soon. She was deserted
by her husband and left without a dollar or a
friend to face life and care for herself and
babies. The case came into the hands of the
Mission and she was cared for by them until the
N.B. G. P.'s is strictly authentic. The Chicago Rescue
Mission will give you details and take charge of any help you may
care to give her.
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 30
time of her confinement, when, with her chil-
dren, she was taken to Dunning Poorhouse
where she was kindly cared for. A baby boy
was born to G. Great pressure was brought to
bear upon this little Italian mother who spoke
no word of English, to induce her to give up her
children. Frightened and weeping, she refused
to do this, declaring she would make a living for
them, and leaving the Poorhouse, she started out
taking the baby and another child with her,
hoping soon to earn the money to care for the
other two.
This she was fortunate enough to accom-
plish, and, taking the four little ones dear to
her heart, went back to the little room on the
top floor of the tenement in Plymouth Court.
G. got work in a sweatshop and made button-
holes at $2.50 a week. She worked hard to keep
up, but the baby sickened and died. The other
children began to get thin and wan. They grew
hungry before her eyes and the mother's heart
frightened and sank within her. A fiend in
human form, J. F , came by and offered the
half-starved mother bread for herself and babies,
offered her marriage as soon as it could be
arranged for. G. took the bread and fed her
children and to-day up on the top floor of the
tenement in Plymouth Court, again deserted and
hungry and helpless, she cr,ies and prays and
makes button-holes, and waits and waits with
fear and wretchedness the coming of another
little child.
The proprietor of the great resort on the
<'3rner of 21st and Dearborn streets said not
40 Chicago's Black Traffic in \\liitc Girls
From a flashlight photograph showing 2-ton weight
steel door connecting sound-proof dungeon cell
with blind passage-way, between 114
and 116 Custom House Place
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 41
long ago to a co-worker of mine who forced her
way into his infamous dive:
"Don't come here to bother my girls; it is of no
use; they are rotten and ripe for H . Soon I will
throw them out myself. Goto the department stores
and the sweatshops and help the underpaid, friend-
less girl there if you must work. I could write a
book as large as that (pointing to the City Direc-
tory) rilled with shrieks and groans of women after
they are lost, but what good would it do? They are
gone then forever :"
In a great measure, the man told the truth.
It is hard to reach a woman after she has once
entered a life of prostitution ; for, like the Infer-
no of old, there should be emblazoned in letters
of blood above the barred door of every White
Slave mart in America, the ancient warning:
"Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here."
There's many a girl homeless and tempted,
underpaid and destitute, who might be saved
from a life of ill-fame if a helping hand and a
shelter were offered her in her hour of indecision
and hunger arid despair.
In the south wall of the basement of 114
Federal Street, formerly known as Custom House
Place, that congested, central Redlight District
of three years ago, there was a blind passage- way
between 114 and 116 Custom House Place, 116
being the notorious dive "The California" now
located at Armour Avenue. On the in-
side, this door opened into a large dungeon,
windowless, sound-proof (about 7x10 feet) and
it is alleged that it was through the alley and
42
Chicago's Black Traffic in WJiite Girls
From a flashlight photograph showing heavy steel
screen used inside the iron-barred windows
of the houses of prostitution in the
old Custom House district
. .- . Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls .. 43
into this blind passage- way that the unwilling
victims of White Slavers (the same syndicate
now operating with Chicago as headquarters)
were carried into this little solitary cell to be
"broken in" by fiendish, brute force to a life of
shame.
The accompanying photograph secured by the
writer gives at least a faint idea of this frightful
trap against the pitiless walls of which have, no
doubt, beat the agonized shrieks of many an
innocent girl your sister and mine as, bap-
tising this hell-hole with blood and tears, her
quivering body was crucified upon a whore-
monger's cross of gold and then torn down to be
cast, bruised, bleeding, but yet alive, into five
years of the awful, seething moral Golgotha of
prostitution and then into lingering 1 death.
The Chicago Rescue Mission and Woman's
Shelter of which the writer is President, has for
two years occupied the premises at 114 Custom
House Place. Upon moving into the place we
found every window incased in heavy iron bars
while between the bars and the glass of each
window was mortised a one-half inch steel screen
(see cut). Entrance or exit from the building
was as utterly impossible as from a penitentiary,
excepting by the front door, and to bring the
place within the requirements of the City law it
was necessary to bring a suit through the Munic-
ipal Court against the owner of the building,
Mrs. Spiegel, against whom through the aid of
Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Oleson, we ob-
tained a verdict and forced her thereon to put
in a rear stairway (see Court records).
44 Chicago s Black Traffic in White Girls
114 Custom House Place is only one of the
fifty similarly notorious dens in the old Redlight
district, and yet it is impossible to make some
people believe that there is such a thing as
forcible detention of a woman in a Chicago house
of prostitution.
FKOM THE "WOMAN'S WORLD"
I quote the following incident cited by Assist-
ant Prosecuting Attorney Roe in an article of
recent date in WOMAN'S WORLD, illustrating
some of the schemes and plans for leading a
girl into a life of ill- fa me. Mr. Roe says:
"A year ago last summer, 15-year old Margaret
Smith was working about her simple home near
Benton Harbor, Michigan. The father, employed
by the Pere Marquette Railroad, was away from
home a good share of the time. One day a grapho-
phone agent came to the house and the family be-
came interested in one of his musical machines.
Shortly afterward this agent brought with him to
the Smith home Frank Kelly, and introduced him
to Maggie, as she was called by her folks. In a day
or two Margaret was on her way to Chicago with
Kelly who promised her an excellent position in the
City. Upon her arrival Margaret was sold to one
of the worst dives in Chicago, located on South
Clark Street and owned by an Italian named Baptista
Pizza. Here she learned that her captor's name was
not Frank Kelly, but an Italian whose real name is
Alphonso Citro. For a year she was kept as a
Slave in this resort, which was over a saloon, and
the entrance was through a back alley. The only
visitors were Italians, who came for immoral pur-
poses. Learning last summer that Margaret's father,
who had been hunting relentlessly for his daughter,
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 45
was on the track of her, the girl was taken by
Alphonso Citro, alias Kelly, to Gary, Indiana.
When the father came to the resort with a police-
man, he found that his daughter had gone. She was
kept in Gary about two months and then returned
to this disreputable place from which she escaped
finally, the Monday before last Christmas. A young
barber took pity on her after hearing her story, and
enlisted the sympathies of his parents who took her
to their home. Alphonso Citro (Kelly) looked for
her almost a week, and at last saw her going from a
store to this home, where she was staying. He
went to the house and demanded at the point of a
revolver that she be given up, as he said:
"I am losing money every day she is gone."
"There was a quarrel over the girl during which
some people from the outside were attracted to the
house by the commotion. Citro, becoming fright-
ened, fled down the street, and as he ran, threw
away the revolver with which he had tried to shoot
the father of the barber during the quarrel, over the
fence into a coal yard. After running two blocks,
he was caught and arrested. Upon these facts this
procurer, Citro, alias Kelly, was prosecuted and found
guilty under the new pandering law of Illinois, and
received a sentence of one year of imprisonment
and a fine of five hundred dollars. The poor father
and mother, distressed and heart-broken, were in
Court during the trial with their arms around each
other, sobbing with joy because their little girl had
been found. Pizza, the owner of the place, was
indicted by the State grand jury, but escaped to
Italy. This case is told to show how girls leave
home upon the promise of securing employment and
are in this way procured for places of ill-repute."
NOTE. Baptista Pizza, it was discovered, did not go to Italy,
but after a few months of hiding, again engaged in his nefarious
business. He was recently arrested for selling an American girl,
fined $1000.00 and sentenced to two years in the House of
Correction.
46 . ^Chicago 's Black Traffic in White Girls..
Chicago's Soul Market.
'
"O, he keeps a, bunch of 'fillies' in a shanty down
near the corner, of Monroe and Peoria streets, and
they're not foreigners, either. They're American
girls! No wonder he can make a bet like that on a
mere chance, from a roll of vellow backs."
/it ^;: H ..-.-.,
The ^speaker was the madam of ,a Peoria
street resort, the listeners, a motley crowd of
women gathered in the rear of a popular saloon
and gambling house not far from the corner of
Green and Madison streets, on the seething, con-
gested West Side of Chicago. These women had
assembled in that screened back room to risk
their hard earned or evil-gotten money on the
horses of the Louisville race track.
There sat a little 18-year old, brown-eyed
milliner, her dissipated face hollow and drawn
from worry and lack of sleep and an insufficient
quantity of nourishing food, while near her a
white-haired old lady in shabby black was
tightly grasping two quarters, her entire worldly
possession. Just across sat a well-dressed
woman restaurant keeper, a young eastern star
and half a hundred others, above all of
whom shone the yellow haired madam of the
Peoria Street resort, the star patron of that great
gambling room for women, each one of whom
was eagerly beckoning the well-groomed book-
maker, feverishly anxious to get her pittance on
the race-track favorite, when a connecting
door was pushed suddenly open and in rushed a
fashionably dressed, brutal-faced young Russian
Chicago's Black Traffic in \ \ 'kite Girls 47
Jew, holding loosely an immense roll of money.
Tens, twenties, hundreds he counted them
until three hundred dollars had been placed to
win upon a "clocker tip" in that day's last race
in Louisville.
There was grim, deadly silence eating, un-
bearable silence in that gambling room as they
waited the ring of the telephone and the name
of the winner. Again the yellow haired ma-
dam's voice screamed shrilly out, for she was
indeed ill at ease, her money was all on the
favorite "Yes, a bunch of American 'fillies'
peddled put; at 50 cents an hour to all comers,
black or white, sick or sound. I^o wonder. Jtje
can make a play like that on an outside
r J -;'(/ , . .1 v
chance." , . , >,
Three-hundred dollafs! '-'Mty heart stood still
almost. The thought flashed through my brain
that that wager meant hundreds of hours of
shame arid slavery and horror to those girls in
the shanties down on Peoria street, some
mother's girl, every one of them. I sat still for
a little while and watched the feverish anxious
throng about me. My heart kept going faster and
faster until I could bear it no longer. Ameri-
can "fillies" and body and soul under a brutal
Russian whore-monger! I slipped quietly out
into the street; night was coming on, and I
walked down Madison and south on Peoria.
Yes, there were the shanties poor, wretched
hovels, every one of them. Out shone the flick-
ering red lights, out came the discordant, rasp-
ing sound of the rented piano, out belched the
48 Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
shrieks and groans of drunken harlots mingled
with the curses of task-masters in a foreign
tongue, attracting the attention of the hundreds
of laborers, negroes and boys, as they walked
home on Peoria street from their day's work.
On I went until I came to a little shed just north
of th.3 slum saloon occupied by one Shellstadt
at the corner of Monroe and Peoria streets, and
checking my steps, I loak^d around me on the
squalid, wretched scene. I was in the midst of
prostitution at its lowest the heart- breaking
dregs of Chicago's thirty thousand public
women. Yes, there they were the fair young
American girl, the stolid Russian Jewess, the
middle-aged, syphiletic harlot, living, prosti-
tuting, dying like so many hurt, broken moths
around that great red-light Chicago's West
Side Soul Market their poor, wrecked, foul
smelling bodies sold day and night at from
twenty-five to fifty cents an hour to all comers
who could pay the pitiful price demanded by
their brutal, soulless masters; and, as I looked,
the burning fire of intense pity entered my soul
for these drug and drink-sodden, diseased and
chained slaves my sisters in Christ and this
great, free American Republic, and so, with a
heart-consuming desire to know more of the
lives of these scarlet women and to help them, if
possible, I began at once a thorough personal
investigation of Chicago's public Slave Market,
visiting these people whenever occasion offered ;
talking with them, gaining their much abused
confidence, until I gradually learned the inside
lines of the saddest story America has ever
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 49
known- since the black mothers of our
Southland were torn from their black and white
babies and with shrieks of agony and heart
strings bleeding and soul rent with blackened
horror were sold to death on the plantations of
Louisiana and Mississippi, and I want to tell
you who read this and who think there is little
truth in the now much agitated question of
White Slavery in America, that in the dives and
dens of our City's underworld I have heard
shrieks and heart cries and groans of agony and
remorse that have never been surpassed at any
public slave auction America has ever witnessed,
as these girls, many of them, oh! so young,
realizing their awful fate, with scalding tears
and moans of horror, shut out from their hearts
and lives father or mother or husband and child,
and turned their sob-shaken, tortured bodies to
face the years of final, relentless wretchedness
and woe, to be at last thrown out sick and
broken, to die in some alley or to be carted off
to Dunning poorhouse to gradual physical decay
and a pauper's burial and grave of obliteration,
while those who sold them just a few years
before go out in their diamonds and fine linen
and their great automobiles to buy up more girls
(it might be your daughter, father, mother; or
it might be mine) to fill the vacancy in the ranks
of this vast army of White Slaves.
A woman said to me the other day, and it
was in a lofty, sneering tone, too: "I doubt if
these women are ever coerced or even imposed
upon."
50 Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
LISTEN; READ, THEN LISTEN.
Sitting in my office one afternoon I listened,
my blood almost freezing, to the following story
vouched for by Mr. C , an immigration in-
spector and brother of a well-known Chicago
reform worker. Here it is as he told it to me:
"One evening some time ago I was looking up a
case down in the Twenty-Second Street red-light
district, and visited and inspected, looking for im-
migrant girls held illegally, a certain house of the
lower class in that neighborhood of prostitution.
While in the house I noticed a young woman lying
very ill (in the last stages of pneumonia, if I remem-
ber the story exactly) and in a semi-conscious con-
dition, and to my horror upon inquiry I learned that
in the rush hours of business this helpless, pain-
racked young woman was open to all comers holding
an accredited room check."
Dear friends, there are true stories heard and
known every day around the City's seething,
blood-red Soul Market that cannot be put into
print stories, though, that were they to be-
come known, would make decent Chicago rise as
one man and cry with a voice outspeaking Fort
Sumter, "White Slavery in Chicago and in
America must cease ! ' '
During my years of study of this question of
prostitution I learned to know personally many
of the characteristic White Slaves of the West
and South Side "levees," One "Alice" I shall
never, never forget. Beautiful aside from her
dissipation, a high school graduate, grammar
and syntax perfect, manner exquisite. "Alice,"
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 51
seduced at eighteen, was at the age of twenty-
one away down the line in the West Side levee
underworld. I used to talk many times with
Alice as she sat in the back parlor of the
4 'house" on Peoria street that gave her shelter,
awaiting her call of "next" to go up stairs with
whosoever negro, white or Chinese might buy
for one dollar (one of the dollars of the Republic
on which is eternally stamped the blessed words,
"In God we Trust") possession of her beautiful
body for one hour. Smoking, always smoking
her doped Turkish cigarette, Alice told me
much of her life, both in years gone forever
and of a daily "levee" existence. She told me
of a father and mother and a beautiful home, of
a lover who came into it and led her away by
night into "levee" Slavery of the awful dis-
grace and disinheritance, of a little baby that
she only knew an hour, of insane remorse and
anguish, until at last she would stand and scream
and scream with mental pain until some whore-
monger knocked her senseless, and then
how she would crawl away to some near-by
shanty saloon and drink herself helpless, to
forget.
As far as I know Alice is still on Peoria
street, and, oh! men and women, there are
thirty thousand of these Alices in Chicago's
great blasting Soul Market to-day.
United States Attorney Sims puts the aver-
age life of a prostitute at ten years or less,
while other excellent authorities put it as low as
five years, as these women must constantly drink
52 Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
any and all drinks purchased for them by
visitors (as much of the business revenue is
derived from the sale of these drinks), thus
forcing them at all times into a half-drunken
condition, rendering them helpless to control the
abnormal, sickening, mind and body wrecking
demands made upon them by the gonorrheal,
syphilitic, sodden wretches of whom not one in
ten is capable of normal sexual coalition, yet
whose debauched, drunken desires and require-
ments, no matter how unnatural and revolting,
must be satisfied by the use of the bodies of
their hopeless victims at fifty or even as low as
twenty-five cents an hour.
Very few young women entering this cess-
pool of prostitution are able to live therein an
average of eight weeks without becoming
infected with one or more of the loathsome
diseases of the underworld, and thus ruined and
horrible they live on and on for three, four or
six years, and at the end of that time thirty
thousand pure young girls, gathered from
prairie homes and village firesides and from out
of our own suburban and city families, must
march out into this great Soul Market to take
the place of the broken wretches whose decaying
bodies are cast into the refuse of our alleys and
sewers to become the menace of every girl and
boy and drunken man who comes within their
clutches or sets foot within their alley hovels.
THE END OF THE WAY.
At about ten o'clock on Saturday evening,
September 19th, I boarded a West Madison
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 53
street car and, transferring north at Halsted
street, alighted at Lake and walked west to
Lewinsky's saloon at the corner of Lake and
Green streets. Going around to the side entrance
on Green street, I discovered in the wine and
back rooms of the wretched place a crowd of
perhaps fifty drunken, dirty, diseased men and
women, most of them foul-smelling, young white
girls huddled in with the worst mob of negroes,
whites and Chinese I have seen in Chicago's
slums, all cursing, drinking, singing and blas-
pheming in plain view and hearing of the street.
I stopped a moment to make sure I was making
no mistake in what I saw and then crossed the
street to interview the dark-eyed little foreign
girl who at its door was boldly soliciting trade
for the saloon and its adjacent evils, just
opposite.
I walked on down toPeoria and south on that
notorious street.
In the row of houses running from Lake to
Randolph street there are approximately six
hundred White Slaves, arid diseased, crippled
prostitutes of the lowest class, dumped from the
city's cleaner dives, and on that night it was
almost impossible to push one's way through
the mass of men and boys whites, negroes,
Turks, Polocks, etc., gathered in front of these
places of public abomination. At the corner of
Randolph and Peoria streets several earnest men
and women were holding a little gospel meeting,
and, stopping with them, I counted during the
thirty minutes I stayed there six hundred and
54 .Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
forty (approximately) men and boys stop in
front of or enter this horrible flesh market.
As I left the scene, a young girl in a drunken,
filthy, diseased condition slipped out of an alley
and followed me, asking me to help her, and as
we sat on the steps of Saints Peter and Paul
Cathedral, corner of Washington boulevard arid
Peoria street, she told me the worst, most heart-
breaking story of wrong and vice and ruin I
have ever listened to (see note.)*
As I left that West Side levee of vice I knew
I had seen prostitution at its lowest ebb and that
from these holes of horror finally went those
awful alley women of the night to sell their
soul and trail their black disease to any young
boy or drunken man who could give them a few
cents or even the price of a drink of whiskey.
Coming down Custom House Place one night
about 10:30 o'clock I overtook, without their
knowledge, six boys, ranging from about twelve
down to perhaps seven years, three of whom I
knew fairly well. Following them from shadow
to shadow, I gathered sufficient of their low-
voiced conversation to make me certain they had
been holding an orgy in a nearby cellar or base-
ment with a drunken harlot, and that together
they had paid her the small sum of seventeen
cents for this damning, soul-destroying com-
merce. One boy, a lad of about nine years, had
*This girl was turned over to the Chicago Rescue Mission,
cleaned and clothed and fed and pointed to Jesus Christ. Her story
was investigated and found true and after receiving medical atten-
tion she was quietly returned to her country home.
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 55
been wheedled by his companions into paying ten
cents of this sum and was arguing for the return
of at least a part of his money, because of the age
and helplessness of the woman and the extreme
short time allowed him by his companions in
his relations with her.
Mr. J. J. Sloan, when he was superintendent
of the John Worthy School, which is the local
juvenile municipal reformatory, reported that
one-third of the street boys sent to him were
suffering from the loathsome diseases and dis-
tempers of the red-light district, nor is this to
be wondered at when we consider the fact that
sexual commerce may be purchased almost any-
where in South State street and in the West
Side alleys for the remarkably low price of ten
cents, or even a glass of beer or whiskey, from
the gonorrheal, syphilitic denizens thrown out
long ago from the better class houses of prosti-
tution to live off of the half-drunken men and boys
to be found in swarms along South State, Hal-
sted and South Clark streets.
Almost invariably, the street boy haunting
these underworld sections of our city is first led
into sexual sin by one of the crippled, half- rotten,
yet painted vampires of the streets whose only
care or hope is a crust of free lunch and enough
whiskey or "dope' ' to drown for a time at least the
last throb of heart arid conscience and keep life a
little longer in the wretched body, and the boy
having purchased for a small fee his own de-
struction trails out again into the night and on
56 Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
into disease and crime and prison, and finally
death.
The average parent of to-day has little idea
of the temptations which constantly surround
and beset the growing boy. I recall a case in
Des Moines, Iowa, where a little degenerate girl
of sixteen caused the moral , and in several cases
physical, ruin of five young boys, all this hap-
pening in an exclusive East Side neighborhood
and under the watchful care of hone.st parents
and friends, so what must be the temptation
thrown out to the young boys of our city when
through block after block of our central dis-
tricts they must come in contact with those
whose only mission is to ruin and debauch.
It should be the direct object, morally and
physically, of every father and mother in this
city to banish these parasitesthese leeches who
suck the life blood of our boys from Chicago's
streets.
Listen, father, mother, there are thirty thous-
and pure, dearly beloved young girls growing
up in our midst to-day who within five years
must, under the present business system of
White Slavery, put aside father, mother, home,
friends and honor, and march into Chicago's
ghastly flesh market to take the place of the
thirty thousand helpless, hopeless, decaying chat-
tels who now daily, behind bolts and bars and
steel screens (see note**), satisfy the abomin-
**Visit any of the great line of abandoned houses in the red-
light district of Custom House Place or Plymouth Court and note
the bars and screens and underground steel doors.
Chicago s Black Traffic in White Girls 57
able lust of (approximately) two hundred and
ten thousand brutal, drunken adulterers.
I believe, as I write, that the final solving of
this reeking, hideous question lies in the moral
and Christian teaching and protection of the
growing girls of our Land. I believe in a rigidly
enforced law that keeps girls under legal age and
unattended, off the down town streets at nights
after a reasonable hour. Harry Balding, the
convicted White Slaver, in his confession before
Judge Newcomer and State's Attorney Roe,
said:
"We would be sent out by resort keepers to work
up some girls, for whom we were paid from $10 to
$50 dollars each, though the cash bonus was much
more. The majority of them were girls we met on
the streets. We would go around to the penny ar-
cades and nickel theaters, and when we saw a couple
of young girls we would go up and talk with them.
I will say for myself I never took a girl away from
her home; the girls I took down there I met in the
stores or on the streets."
There is a league of Masonry worldwide that
makes it possible for a Mason anywhere, in trouble
or distress, to raise his hand toward the heavens
with a certain sign, and if there be a brother
Mason within reach, that brother, no matter of
what nationality, kindred or tongue, is sworn to
give him all needed protection. Listen, father,
mother, sister; listen, brother!
To-day from beneath Chicago's awful moral
sewerage system, which has sucked their hearts
and souls under, thirty thousand trembling
58 Chicago 's Black Traffic in White Girls
hands are held up to High Heaven and to you
for help, hands reeking with the blood on which
some whore monger has fattened, the hands
though of your sisters and of mine. And I believe
that here in Chicago, the greatest market for
White Slaves on the Continent, should be formed
a league that would become world- wide, of earn-
est, law-abiding men and women whose efforts,
united with those of the proper police, municipal
and Federal authorities, would make it practi-
cally impossible for a girl to be sold into or
compelled to lead an immoral life, and through
whose influence such open, publicly-protected
flesh markets as our red-light and levee districts
would be banished forever from Chicago streets.
And I believe with all my heart that this can only
be accomplished by education, by agitation, by
legislation, by the ballot and by the power of
God, directing a great national army of well in-
formed, moral and Christian men and women
against this vast, thoroughly organized, well
administered and heavily financed public horror
of our Republic.
I believe in helping, God knows, with heart
and hand and money every fallen, or as one has
put it, every "knocked down" woman in our
Land whom there is the slightest chance to help
in any way; but I believe, first of all, in using
every known measure to keep our girls from
falling*.
You and I live beneath the only flag in all the
world that has never known defeat, and the very
basic principle upon which that flag is built is
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 59
human liberty and human protection, and so by
personal work and co-operation with every
other reform and labor organization for the up-
lifting of womanhood, by song and by prayer
and the Power of the Cross, let us set ourselves
to help these helpless ones in our midst until
the angels shall take up the story of shame and
bitterness and wrong and bear to all the world
and to Heaven itself the swift acknowledgment
that you are your brother's keeper.
60
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
x
Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls 61
The Only Place of
Its Kind
In Chicago
Five 'Hunt sand and Forty NigJifs Lodging and
over Six Thousand Meals furnished to
Homeless Women by the
WOMAN'S SHELTER
733-735-737 Washington Boulevard
(near Halsted)
during the year ending September 1, 1911.
Seventy^ per cent of these women have
been aided into honest employment.
A Hundred Girls
have been Saved from Lives of Sin and given a
chance to earn a Respectable Living.
Our Doors are Never Closed
We are in touch with every Slum
and \ r ice District in the city ever)'
Prison and Hospital, and with
the Poorhouse at Oak Forest
We are Non-Sectarian and Co-operative with all Reform
and Christian Works
Chicago s Black Traffic in White Girls
A dozen Christian Homes and a Municipal
Lodging House care for the friendless
down-and-out man. The
Chicago Rescue Mission's
Woman's Shelter
cares for the Friendless "down-and-
out" Woman. Our Shelter is not a
"Rescue Home" in the ordinary
sense of the word, but
A Place where a Glean Bed, Food, Coffee and Clothing
may be Obtained by any Homeless Woman
not a subject for Police interference,
for One or More nights as she needs ;
and where she is given Definite Aid
to Immediate Employment and as-
sured of shelter until she receives
her week's wages.
FIVE THOUSAND AND FORTY NIGHT'S LODGINGS
TOGETHER WITH
OVER SIX THOUSAND MEALS
have been furnished to cold, hungry,
Stranded Girls and Women this
year by Our Institution.
Seventy per Cent of These Have been Aided to Secure
Honest Employment,
but scores have been turned away
because we lacked Equipment,
Warmth, Funds, etc., to aid them.
Chicago's Black Traffic in \ \ 'Jiitc Girls
Our Work Reaches
Every Slum and Redlight District
in the City
the Hospitals, Prisons, Poorhouses, everywhere
unfortunate women are found
We co-operate with Churches, Missions, Em-
ployment Bureaus, Charitable Institutions,
etc., throughout the City
Our Institution has Thirty-one Large Rooms
A Corner in Our Woman's Shelter
What We Need
We need to add Forty More Beds.
We need a better Hot Water System.
We need a Systematic Employment Bureau.
We need another good Outside Worker.
We need Coffee, Clothing, Coal.
We need Your Help, generously, in a supreme
effort to raise One Thousand Dollars with which
to accomplish all these things.
64 Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls
Schedule of Work
Year ending August 31st, 1911.
Number of Night's Lodgings Furnished by the
Chicago 'Rescue Mission's Woman Shelter. 5,040
Number of Meals '. 5,200
Special Lodgings '....'. ...... 489
:
Special Meals 677
Calls and Distribution of Fruit at Oak Forest
Poor House 4,914
Religious Services White Cross Woman's Shelter 26
Jail, Court and Slum Visits 1,210
Reform Literature Distributed, pages, about .300,000
Yours and His,
CHICAGO RESCUE MISSION
733-735-737 Washington Blvd.,
CHICAGO, ILL.
PHONE MONROE 4833
Mrs. Jean T. Zimmermann, M. D.
President Chicago Rescue Mission and Woman's Shelter.
Superintendent Department of Health and Heredity of the Cook
County and Chicago W. C. T. U.